Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race

By Naben Ruthnum

No two curries are the same. This Curry asks why the dish is supposed to represent everything brown people eat, read, and do.

Curry is a dish that doesn't quite exist, but, as this wildly funny and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn't properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations. By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own upbringing, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta's Karma Cola and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford's Heat, Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavor calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters. Following in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands, Curry cracks open anew the staid narrative of an authentically Indian diasporic experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Release date: Aug 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781770565234

Naben Ruthnum

Naben Ruthnum is the author of A Hero of Our Time, and Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race. He lives in Toronto and also writes thrillers as Nathan Ripley.

Book preview

Introduction

I’ve only visited Mauritius, my particular old country, once. It was 1991, I was nine, and the visit turned into a funeral. Not my own – even though I did feel like I was dying while I sweated against the polyester chafe of the new Bart Simpson pyjamas my aunt had bought me during our London stopover.

My father, sister, and I had gone to Mauritius to visit my grandmother, discovering only when we arrived that she was terminally ill. Well, my dad and sister found this out, not me. I was too young to be involved. I was also relatively unconcerned; I didn’t know her, having met her only once, as a toddler too young to form memories. The only recollection I have of being in my grandmother’s presence took place shortly before her funeral, in her hospital room, where I pulled on the brim of my Bulls cap until my father took it off my head. We left a few minutes later.

I was shuttled off to my mother’s relatives, and so missed the death that Dad didn’t expect to deal with. Unequipped to face such seriousness, and isolated enough from this culture that I exhibited a juvenile version of cold, anthropological curiosity, I came back to a Hindu funeral: a pyre, torches. The only referent I had at that age was Return of the Jedi. A priest took a knife-swipe at a coconut balanced on my father’s shoulder and missed. I laughed (a memory that still chills) and was shushed. Earlier, a tonsured chunk of hair had been taken out of my father’s temple, exposing pale, veined skin. My unknown grandmother was wrapped in a sari, then wrapped in branches, then wrapped in flames. We left food offerings at the feet of temple gods, then, mysteriously, ate them after the funeral.

Before, or after, there was a curry. Vegetables, a thick sauce, rice that I couldn’t get the knack of clumping and thrusting into the sauce with the bird-beak grip my uncles and cousins demoed for me. It had been forks and knives up until this day, as it would be afterwards. Tiny cuts I didn’t know I had at the base of my cuticles tasted the curry as I did, the elements of sauce that bit my tongue taking purchase in the blood there, leaving a sting that lasted.

This is how books like these are supposed to start, isn’t it? While it would be a little thin as a memoir, the material I have here would be excellent fodder for for a diasporic South Asian novel, one of many books in the genre about reconnecting to a homeland that makes sense of my alienated, Western childhood. But the brief account is incomplete, missing a key element: when I went back, I didn’t have the revelatory homecoming or correction to a sense of loss that I’ve since read about in countless books – good ones, like Romesh Gunsekera’s 1994 Man Booker finalist Reef, and stinkers like Kamala Nair’s 2011 trope-ridden mini epic, The Girl in the Garden. There’s no comfort or Truth to be found in my story of ‘going home’: only a series of incidents that revealed how isolated from the country of my family’s origin, how Westernized, I was at the time and, in many ways, still am. The tactile details – the Bulls cap, the banana leaf, that curry meal that hurt my fingers and mouth – they’re genuine, but on the page they become clichéd symbols in a story I’ve never wanted to write.

Curry isn’t real. Its range of definitions, edible and otherwise, rob it of a stable existence. Curry is a leaf, a process, a certain kind of gravy with uncertain ingredients surrounding a starring meat or vegetable. It’s an elevating crust baked around previously bland foodstuffs, but it’s also an Indian fairy tale composed by cooks, Indians, émigrés, colonists, eaters, readers, and writers.

Fuck off, my ideal reader might be saying right now. Of course it’s real, it was on my plate and soaking into your naan last night. And you’d be right, sort of. But even if the flavour is real, and delicious, it’s also become a crucial element of how the story of South Asian cultural identity is told, in our mouths and on the page. It’s a concept too large to be properly controlled by a recipe – the recommendations become descriptions of certain dishes, each push toward using hing or amchur an encouragement to use the same spice in a different dish, or to add so much turmeric that you permanently dye your roommate’s white plastic cooking spoon.

Like wine, curry’s mixture of definable qualities and conceptual breadth wields a metaphorical power. Paul Giamatti, playing a neurotic oenophile, has a small speech in Alexander Payne’s 2004 film Sideways where he’s talking about Pinot Noir but really talking about himself: ‘It’s thin-skinned, temperamental … y’know, it’s not a survivor, like Cabernet … No, Pinot needs constant care and attention … Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot’s potential can then coax it into its fullest expression.’ I remember being irritated by this transparently symbolic dialogue in a movie I’d been enjoying, though in later viewings it seems to me that the script and Giamatti’s character, Miles, know exactly who is being spoken about through the wine, that the personal symbolism of Pinot is a rooted part of Miles’s personal myth, one he repeats to himself and to anyone who asks him and cares to listen.

Curry can, and often does, tell a similarly loaded story, but one that goes beyond emphasizing aspects of a single persona: it carries a weight of meaning across the immense and indefinable South Asian diasporic culture. The familiar flavour is an aromatic but invisible link between the writer and the reader, the cook and the eater. In the steadily building mass of South Asian diasporic writing and discussion of identity, curry is an abiding metaphor for connection, nostalgia, homecoming, and distance from family and country. This collection of dishes covers a lot of metaphorical ground. It relies on a non-specific blend, a combination that can be adjusted and spun multiple ways, and yet carries identifiable defining top and bottom notes of flavour. The exact ingredients often aren’t clear to anyone but the cook, and sometimes not even to him or her – the Indian ammas of recipes and diasporic novels are notorious for their freehanded dashes and pinches of ingredients, and the first- or second-generation protagonists of these novels are consistently grasping for a sense of identity and place as they try to get the recipe right.

Eating, reading, and remembering are all activities that begin domestically, perhaps especially in diasporic households, where home life can be all of life for kids who don’t insist on spending time outside or with friends in unregulated, non-learning-related activities. In the spirit of a book about curry and reading, I should be making a comparison between the bookshelves and the spice rack of a diasporic household, but there’s a crucial difference. I got to choose what I read when I was a kid, but not what I ate. From the outset, I avoided books with Indian names on the cover, with tangles of red silk and those fonts that designers love sticking above a picture of a banyan tree and a scattering of cardamom seeds. I demanded a justification for why we – amend that we to my parents; I wasn’t buying anything – bought so many of these books written by people from a country my parents hadn’t even grown up in, or visited. They didn’t bother offering an answer to my questions, which were, more truthfully, attacks. The back-cover copy on these volumes was, if not identical, repetitive. Well into my teens, I’d always opt for Roth over Rushdie, Nabokov over Narayan.

Stories about reading are necessarily stories about prejudice: forming reading habits means cultivating strict prejudices and then carefully discarding them. As the posters in the kids’ section at the library inform us, reading can take you anywhere. But damned if you’re not going to decide exactly where and when you want to go. Much of the research for this book derived from books that had arrived in my hands over the years and articles that had flitted into my feed: reading outside the classroom is about controlling the accidental arrival of information, turning a chaotic flow of words and stories into an organized system of taste through rejection.

My family had a strict rule against reading at the table, the given logic being that it forced blood to your brain that should properly be in the gut, aiding digestion. My parents both being medical professionals (an ophthalmologist and a psych nurse), I didn’t challenge this logic.

We ate with the news on, and only rarely was the nightly meal not Mauritian food, which I’d describe to friends as Indian food as a shorthand to leave out the explanation of Mauritius being an island off the east coast of Africa, and later just describe, self-mockingly, as ‘Curry, what else would we eat?’ anticipating and cutting off jokes from the fairly unprogressive Western Canada youth of the 1990s. I loved the stuff, anyway. I accepted it and defended it as part of my cultural identity, an easily identifiable and likeable part of it, one in which I had built-in, extremely fake expertise. Any time a white friend reported his mom or dad making a curry with coconut milk or snap peas in it, I dismissed it as ‘the white man’s curry,’ and was at least correct in that neither ingredient was common in the Mauritian curries that were made in my house.

Curry was a territory I defended, an absolute truth based on the way it was made in my family’s kitchen, despite the delicious counterarguments we ate at restaurants in Vancouver (and eventually even in Kelowna, the expanding small city in British Columbia where I grew up). There was an acceptable authenticity in what we ate, one I felt ran counter to the books with various brown hands, red fabrics, clutched mangoes, and shielded faces that turned up on our shelves with such regularity that we may have been members of some Columbia House Diasporic Novel subscription package that none of us knew how to cancel. My family enjoyed the books, and continue to read some of them. In doing research for this volume, I had to expand beyond my usual method – picking up books that interest me and finding connected texts. I asked a close

Reviews for Curry

[kevn57-163679 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book was so much more then I expected, it is a book about curry and its cultural importance, reading and race also immigration and immigrates kids who have always lived in their new country. It's great that it's about a Canadian writer so we have a view of racism explicit and implied that covers not just the U.S. but the white West. Oh and there are also recipes.